General Tactics

People with a little more experience, please, feel free to correct and add on as needed.

The general consensus of the order of things that I have seen/ read about is this:
build up to bowman as quickly as possible and raid Goblins, Prawns, and Orcs of lower levels. Once you are doing that with relative ease,
build up ballistas to where you have two to three thousand and start raiding/conquering Reapers till you have somewhere around three to five thousand,
Now you're going to want to go after Black Widows. Conquer those till you get a few million (you may want to buy a lot of them from the Market if you have the gems). Once you have roughly three million you can take on a County.
After that the sky's the limit, keep raiding and conquering to keep up your hungry army. Build up your Black Widow numbers so you can take on larger Devil cities. Black Widow armies seem to be the way to go about hitting the big cities. Some people send in Lizards for support, but by this time you should have a pretty decent grasp of the game play. Also, before attacking a city, I suggest scouting it to see what troops it has lurking in its depths because not all cities contain the same things.


I just found that most people like to go in this order of Monsters:
Ballistas to get Reapers
Reapers to get Lizards
Lizards to get Widows
Widows to get Fallen


Tirade posted on the Alliance channel in the game a really good ratio to try to go for when conquering Reapers and Lizards. You will need ONE Ballista for every TWO Reapers ; Whereas you will need ONE Reaper for every 100 Lizards. Now be aware that this is the BARE MINIMUM to take.

This is why you are gong to want to send in "speed bumps" which means that you will want to send in one of your lesser troops. The common use of speed bumps is a Ground unit (usually a Militia), a Cavalry unit (usually a Hussar), and an Axeman. Behind those units, your main part of your army (the Ballistas and/or the Lizards) will take the absolute minimum of losses, if any!

Keep in mind that while reapers are great offensive units, they are also the best defensive units as well. If you are starting out getting reapers but don't have a lot of ballista you can use the reapers you already have as a wall between them and your ballista. With 6-800 ballista with some points in fortified armor you should be able to get 6 or so rounds out of 200 or so reapers of your own. This will allow more rounds to conquer them than the speedbump strategy which gives 2 or 3 rounds tops nowadays. And when you get 4-800 from innumerable, your losses don't seem that bad.

You have it about right M0Bius - just a few more notes:

In early stage when you get bowmen just raid Prawns and Blackwidows (They take extra damage from pierceing attack). Don't worry about Goblins and Orcs.

Also with city attacking a few notes
Spying won't really work unless you have about 10,000 spies and extra spy research. So if you want to find out the type of troops send about 1 of everything you have - they need to survive at least one round.

Most cities will be taken down with about 1.5mil widows, except for ones with a lot of Fallen. Fallen destroy Widows. So if you have a city with a lot of Fallen i.e 30k or so, make sure you build up a bigger widow army before attacking or you'll lose most of them.

I saw somewhere where the question was asked, Monster vs Human army, should I even bother building humans? This was a reply I saw, I thought it was really good info and wanted to share it here!

I spent TONS of time upgrading barracks to level 10. Centurions are great, but you know what? They die in droves. There is no way, and I mean NO WAY to avoid it from happening if you use them. Once your army is big enough there is no possible way you can afford the gems to sustain a sizable army of them.

Bowmen, longbowmen, axe-throwers are fine. These don't die if you plan your battles wisely.

I also spent lots of time upgrading to calvaries, and almost paladins--but then I realized, these will die too. In droves.

As Pocketem said, they might change the upkeep system later so these troops will be beneficial. For fighting small armies they are ok. But overall, it is absolutely not worth the time and resources.

You also have to think that if you are playing smart and not actually having your troops and monsters wasting your resources (i.e. keep them in a dead city and sending all the gold and food to a city that can use it) then what are you spending all this food and gold on? I have 3 cities and two are almost always close to full (9,999,999) and although recruiting, upgrading a building, and researching take a long time, they sure don't take much gold and food. So you save all this money so your troops and monsters don't waste it and then do what with it? Build MASSIVE amounts of troops... or you can just you know, let those barracks, stables, and archery ranges just sit there...

Breakdown

Once you get to a point that your supply production and loot from raids doe not keep you in a positive number, start a city (make sure you at least get to command center 5) and dump your troops there during times you are not raiding/conquering.

Raid/conquer with these troops from this "dead/ghost" city, making sure to TRANSPORT the loot to your main city or a storage city.

With your other cities collecting supplies without upkeep costs, you can research and upgrade building to your hearts desire (always always have one going at all times!) you can use the rest to make a seriously large army.

In each city, at all times you should be building 1,000-15,000 using "spam recruiting" (use the fast recruit to take 30% of the remaining time away.)
Since fast recruit goes by % and fast build is always 1 hour, with three fast recruits you could go from 1000 hours, to 700 hours to 490, down to 343! Give it a half day do it again, 343 to 240, 240 to 168, and 168 to 117. In one day you could go from 1000 hours to 117 much more valuble than fast build.

So if you have 1 barracks, 1 stable, 1 archery range and 1 weapons shop in each city (you may have more) you can crank out hundreds of thousands of human units. Even though they are weak and die very easy, they will do a lot of damage, act as good pawns and (if your smart) when sending huge troops into large battles (conquering countys and such) you will have 1000 gems ready to revive these units (yes 1000 gems revives all units it seems ) and end up not losing any of your massive army, they don't cost anything in a dead city, and become living dead pawns

Downside, all this can change if they change the way upkeeps costs work and whether or not you don't have to pay a cost to send troops on raids or conquers, but why have all your money sit there if your not gonna use it on loads and loads of human units? Even weak units in large masses (Overwhelming) can take out reapers and other strong units.

I think what really brings down human based armies is the actual time it takes to get a large number of them.
Consider level 10 blackwidows.

If I conquer them I will get anywhere from 400k-800k. It takes 50 health which with no alliance bonus is five hours of real time.

So now if I try to recuit 175k Longbowmen it takes 12000 hours from them to be built. With using fast recuit at 30 mana a pop (3 hours no alliance). It will still take me a three or so days of just waiting for mana and accelerating the recuit time. (Without doing any math - too lazzzy)

Or I could just conq a smaller group of lizards and make more than that in 5 fives hours.

that being said you miswell spend you're free mana and resources on making them. You don't really have much else to do with it all.

On request of Drake, here is a little something about attacking widows and I'll throw in something about lizards just for fun!

Black widows:

Conquering Black Widows Using Lizards
Troop size:
1 Lizard >> 2 Black Widow
speed bump:
1 Militia

Best way to calculate this is look at the overwhelming group's maximum possibility, divide that by 2, and you know how many Lizards to send.

note: this is with lvl 10 piercing, however a truer ratio is something closer to 1 lizard >> 3 Black Widows, but better being safe than sorry.

As for speed bumps I'd recommend;
First speed bump is anything with 120 speed. These are paladins, widows and trolls.

Second speed bump is anything else with 30 range. There's a whole host of troops and monsters that fit this category: cavalry, hussars, militia, sowrdsmen, centurions, goblins, orcs, prawns, gargoyles, witches, and vampires.

Third speed bump is anything with range greater than 30, but less than your attacking troop. This includes: axe throwers, fire beasts, bowmen, gorgons, and demons. Dont send 1 bowman if you're attacking with gorgons!

Never send a reaper as a speed bump - it outruns everything.


Lizards:

I know that Drake has been trying to figure out the best route to use for reapers vs lizards... well, Give up on conquering large groups of lizards without taking reaper losses unless you are the biggest reaper hoarder on Earth. lol
My best advice at this point is to go for about a 50:1 ratio or better on any lizards you conquer if you wish to incur normal or recoverable losses. it is impossible to conquer lizards with reapers without incurring losses.

Even with 1 bajillion reapers, the lizards still get an attack in, meaning you will inevitably lose 500ish reapers.

The best you can hope for is to have enough reapers to win the battle in round 2.

If you want to use Black Widows to conquer Lizards, I suggest send one reaper and 5+mil widows. The reaper is to extend battlefield to 300, otherwise widows would take dmg in the first round.

This way would be my way of choice... widows come cheap.

Dragon Knights is a best online game. I love to play this game. Also, You people are doing nice discussion and sharing useful information about the game. Some tactics are very nice and useful game tactics.